A few hours after beta 5 went out, someone in our Discord noticed that the welcome tour's handwritten hello stuttered the first time it played, and that their GPU jumped every time the word wrote itself after that. They were right, and it was worth a beta of its own.
- 73%less GPU time while the word writes
- 0.8 msof main thread per frame, down from 2.1
- 1fix since beta 5
A hello that costs less
The hello is a single pen stroke written in Liquid Glass over the tour while the card waits out of focus. It now writes without a stutter on its first run and costs about a quarter of the GPU time it did, while the word itself looks the same.
Two things went wrong. On a first run, the tour used those same seconds to build the heavier pages that come later, so the pen fought them for the main thread. Those pages now wait until the word has gone.
And every frame rebuilt the word from 1,600 points and asked macOS to lens a brand new glass shape, 120 times a second. The word is now traced from its own curves, with a third of the work per frame, and it writes at 60 frames a second. To watch it again, open Settings, About, Introduction, Replay.